I am deeply thankful to Urban Studies (and Michele Acuto) for the review forum they organised around my For a Liberatory Politics of Home (Duke University Press).
The forum comprises interventions by Colin McFarlane, Ash Amin, Katherine Brickell, Erin McElroy, Saanchi Saxena, and my closing reflection.
Freely available at: https://www.urbanstudiesonline.com/review/book-review-forum-for-a-liberatory-politics-of-home/
Excerpts:
Colin McFarlane: “Michele Lancione’s For a Liberatory Politics of Home is a rare and remarkable piece of scholarship. It breaks new ground and will likely make a lasting impact in Geography and Urban Studies. It does what all great books do: inspires new kinds of thinking, and does so by mobilising a deceptively straightforward argument, the kind of argument that when you read it the topic in question seems to have shifted on its axis.”
Ash Amin: “I cannot think of another book that offers such a profound reformulation of home-lessness, and it does so with breathtaking mastery of critical theory, the political economy and biopolitics of capitalist dispossession and expulsion, and evidence from around the West of what the machinery of home and homelessness produces on the ground.”
Katherine Brickell: “For a Liberatory Politics of Home is a monograph which is extremely rare – to stunning effect Michele combines the conceptual, empirical, personal, practical, philosophical and political […] It turns homeless studies on their head by shattering the oppositional frames of home and homelessness and centring an anti-capitalist critique of housing. The feminist-routing of the book also weaves through its pages, including the author’s critical and self-reflexive discussions of his own place in geography, and indeed academia more broadly.”
Erin McElroy: “[T]here is something hauntological about the way in which housing gets troubled throughout the book, for instance in Lancione’s exploration of the extractive spectres of Italian Catholic patriarchal fascism which creep into Italy’s housing present. […] It is not ‘the housing question’ as much as ‘the question of housing’ that he argues we need to further interrogate. […] What does it mean then, to move beyond inhabitation, or to radically inhabit housing? Attempting to guide readers in exploring this question, Lancione opens up space to theorise a housing future yet to come.”
Saanchi Saxena: “[A] brilliant, thought-provoking contribution to the fields of urban studies and critical geography. Where the book shines is in its proposal of a radical epistemology that breaks the dichotomy of home and homelessness, reads those occupying the sites of homelessness as performing their own politics of inhabitation, advocates for a structural overhaul of the way we think of housing and housing interventions, and on a broader scale, prompts us to rethink our understanding of urban inhabitation.”
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